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See our free consumer journal for automobile and road users,
three subscription journals on road maintenance, engineering,
and injury litigation, and a highway safety publications catalog.

Nebraska District Judge Comments on "Tort Reform"

In his opinion on Kerrilyn Symington v. State of Nebraska (Case No. 105-
191 in the District Court of Lincoln County, Nebraska, March 31, 1995), District
Judge John P. Murphy commented on present attitudes in the United States toward
large damage awards. Since compensation limitations often affect damage awards
in legal cases involving highway and traffic safety issues, a quotation from Judge
Murphy s comments is presented below. A summary of Symington entitled State
Liable Where Expert Witnesses Show Curb Was a Hazardous Condition begins
on the first page of this edition of the TranSafety Reporter.

Calling these statements a short digression before he specified damage
awards for the Plaintiff, Judge Murphy wrote:

Triers of fact, at this time in our nation s history, make their decisions
in a climate that reflects skepticism that jurors and judges can properly
decide civil cases and award proper damages arising in those cases. The
present climate further fosters a cynicism that arises from a general belief
that ours is a civil justice system out of control, driven by greedy litigants and
lawyers seeking ever larger verdicts.

In this climate, a cloud has formed. Under the darkness of this cloud,
the harsh light of the media tends to focus the public s attention on a very
few large and occasionally unwarranted verdicts. Whether this focus is a
result of the media s desire to accentuate the unusual or is a result of the
manipulation of public opinion by those corporations and individuals who
stand to profit by the accentuation of aberrant verdicts is of no moment.
What tends to be obscured by this focus is the fact that hundreds and
thousands of cases are decided each week in the United States that do not
involve large or excessive verdicts. Scant attention is paid to verdicts that
are fair and reasonable, and virtually no attention is paid to those verdicts
that inadequately compensate those citizens who have been negligently
injured by others. The focus helps to fuel the rising storm of criticism which
is injurious to the functioning of civil justice in this country regardless of
whether the criticism arises innocently or is a conscious effort by some to
drive down the amount of damages awarded in civil cases across the nation.

This injury to the civil justice system involves two aspects. First,
virtually every juror now brings to the courtroom preconceived notions
colored by the extensive critical coverage and talk show condemnation of
outrageous jury awards. This criticism and condemnation is often based on
horror stories that, more often than not, turn out to be apocryphal.

Second, sincere but often misinformed citizens and politicians, based
on this publicity, often call for changes under the misguided term of tort
reform. This tort reform, more appropriately called compensation
limitation, often results in calls for caps on awards of damages. Such
arbitrary caps are based on an erroneous assumption that triers of fact,
jurors and judges, are incapable of awarding a proper amount of damages in
individual cases despite the fact that no empirical evidence exists to support
such a conclusion.

The imposition of such caps would also ignore the individual and
reduce all injured people to one homogeneous mass, indistinguishable from
one another, to be dealt with by a cookie cutter mentality. Such an approach
debases individuality and does a great disservice to those individuals with
devastating injuries * * *

One would hope that any comprehensive analysis of our civil justice
system, a system that has existed since before our country began, could be
delayed until we weather the present storm and a fresh breeze has had an
opportunity to blow away the hyperbolic rhetoric and outright falsity that have
beclouded reason and logic.
(pages 15-17)